One peek at GameSpot's live video reveal of the complete roster of the upcoming WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2010 and it's clear that THQ and developer Yuke's are cramming a bunch of substance into the game. In addition to a roster packed with WWE SuperStars and Divas as well a focus on creation tools (including the sort new story designer, which sounds like a load of fun), the game will plus have a ton of match types to compete in. Today, we've got a look at two of the match types in the game, Championship Scramble and Royal Rumble.

Championship Scramble

Mix a timer together with a fatal four-way match, and toss in a championship belt up, and you'll have an concept of how the Championship Scramble works. In that make new match type, two wrestlers start off the match and a new competitor enters at specific intervals during the timed match. Eventually, five wrestlers are in the ring at once and whether any one of them scores a pinfall, he is declared the title holder. The last man holding the title once the timer runs out leaves as the champion.

You have three match-length options in the Championship Scramble matches: five, ten, or twenty minutes and you can choose when your wrestler enters the ring or set it to random. The longer the match, the larger the interval you have until new wrestlers enter the ring so, whether your wrestler is in early, the most successful strategy seems to be to work by your opponent as quickly as possible and get a quick pinfall. From there you can do your best to stay away from the opponents until the end of the match. Once the ring fills up with more wrestlers, successful pins are hard to come by, as the AI wrestlers will inevitably break up each pin attempt. Anything goes in that match, including the use of foreign objects like chairs, sledgehammers and two-by-fours, so you'll need to be on your toes at all times.

Royal Rumble

A fan favorite in the real WWE, the Royal Rumble features a constant stream of WWE SuperStars entering the ring, each of them looking to survive and win that prestigious match. In the game, you'll be able to play three variations on the Royal Rumble: 10-man, 20-man, and 30-man, the last of which turns out to be a Herculean task of survival, particularly whether you're called into the match in the early goings.

As with the Championship Scramble matches, you'll be able to choose which SuperStars take part in the Rumble, as well as which wrestler you control. You can set your wrestler's entry round or set it to random and take your chances. Once the match begins, it's a matter of waiting until your number is called and watching the mayhem unfold in the ring. Wrestlers are eliminated from the Royal Rumble only whether they are tossed out of the ring, and it's common for alliances to be formed and broken at any moment as wrestlers gang up to get opponents out of the ring.

Once your wrestler is in the squared circle, you'll be looking to cut, slap and slam anything that gets in your way, while doing your best to avoid getting ganged up on. With lots of wrestlers in the ring at once (I counted a maximum of six in the ring during our instance with the game), your best bet for success will be to take advantage of someone else's weakness: look for Superstars that are getting ganged up on and wait for a chance to push them by the top rope. whether a wrestler is struggling to put someone by the top, you can join in on the action and help him out as well.

Unlike previous versions of the Royal Rumble, ring-outs in SVR 2010 won't just be button-mashing minigames. There are several different types of ring-outs in the game, each with a slightly different control scheme:

Middle rope elimination: The most straightforward of the bunch, that ring-out is accomplished by rapidly pressing the button shown on screen. whether you've got an AI wrestler or two helping out, the chance of eliminating your opponent increases. whether you're on a defense and have a finisher stored up, you can instantly escape middle rope elimination by pressing the right bumper (R1 on PS3).

Bottom rope elimination: When attempting an elimination here, a meter will pop up; to ring-out your opponent, you'll need to stop a cursor in the meter's blue target zone by pressing the A button (X on PS3). whether you've got a finisher on defense, you can escape by pressing the right bumper (R1).

Corner elimination: This one's all about timing. When attempting to eliminate an opponent in the corner, you'll see a button icon seem on screen; press it before your opponent and you'll gain an advantage–do it sufficient times and you'll eliminate him. Again, whether you have a finisher stored you can escape a corner elimination by pressing the right bumper (R1).

Naturally, conserving your energy in the Royal Rumble is of supreme importance. Unless you're the last one in the ring, you can inevitably count on some of the biggest WWE stars coming late in the match. In one Rumble I played–using Finlay who had entered early on in the bout–I made it all the way to the final pairing only to be eliminated by a relatively fresh Triple H. Surprises are common in the Rumble; in one case, you might think you've got a wrestler ready for elimination, only to have him flip by the top rope, land on the mat and roll back into the ring.

As elsewhere in the game, you can use created wrestlers in both Championship Scramble and in the Royal Rumble but, unless you've spent some day building up their attributes, they won't be much challenge for the heavy hitter Superstars. One of the best ways to beef up your created wrestlers is to spend some instance in SVR 2010's story mode, known as Road to WrestleMania. We'll have a look at the mode, its multiple storylines, and how you progress your created Superstars in the game, in our next look at the game on Wednesday, October 7.

Image courtesy of gamespot

As they invent their way to the Xbox Live Arcade, old arcade space shooters have evolved visually with revamped, psychedelic visuals and a high-energy soundtrack. Ion Assault is not a remake, but it chases the trend of using a simple space shooter formula with a bit of evolution. Instead of aiming and firing at the nearest asteroid or aggressive spaceship, you need to absorb the particles around you to build up adequate potential to protect yourself or to fire at your enemies. We had an opportunity to play with a preview build and found that while it may not be as frantic or crazy as Geometry Wars, Ion Assault has its own way of sucking you into the action.

The game plays like many other shooters. You use your left analog stick to pilot your ship and the right analog stick to direct your aim. The difference with Ion Assault is that you hold the left trigger to gather nearby particles around your ship so that once you have a healthy orange glow, you can keep the particles as a shield or release and fire them into nearby enemies and asteroids to clear the stage. It’s like charging a giant beam of destruction before blasting obstacles into smithereens. Power-ups are available and sometimes hidden within slow-moving asteroids or attached to an enemy ship, giving you the ability to slow down duration or the ability to gather additional ion.

At first, the gameplay doesn’t seem to be very fast, but once you get into the later stages, the pace picks up considerably as you dodge quick-moving ships and other space rubbish littered across the screen. The goal is to clear everything in sight and thereupon jump into a portal that magically appears–which leads you to the next area–while racking up that high score. The game gauges how quickly you blow up debris, so whether you’re a skilled player, more enemy ships will seem so that you have a chance to gather more multipliers to increase your score.

What’s great about Ion Assault is that it has several multiplayer modes. You can tackle the campaign cooperatively with a friend so that you share a score while you manufacture your way through the four different sectors and face each menacing boss at the end. It can be hard to play alone when you’re limited to three lives, but with a friend, the experience is much more fun and your chances of success are higher–depending on your partner. There are additionally online and offline four-player Versus modes, in which you send squadrons out of your drifting base and guide your kamikaze fighters into the opponent’s ship. The flaming bright ball in the center is poor news, so all you really have to do is build certain that your base’s opening isn’t facing the middle of the screen and soon after press the bumpers to send a fleet of fighters to your side. that can get hectic with four players, but whether you only have one partner, the cooperative campaign is much more fun.

Ion Assault’s visuals can get to the point where it’s hard to see the action, but for the most part, the explosive effects are kept at a manageable level. The music isn’t as upbeat as we would expect, but it works as background noise while you fly through space. There’s still no price on that space shooter or a release moment, but we’ll update you with more knowledge as soon as it becomes available. Ion Assault is expected to hit Xbox Live Arcade at the end of that month.

Check out more info at gamespot

Check out the image of a 120GB Xbox 360 Elite package that was captured from a local Walmart by Ubergizmo staff. While it will scan for $399 at the moment, folks have spotted retailers’ print flyers including Walmart that quote one Benjamin less at $299, in view of the PS3 Slim’s recent launch and announcement of a similar price point. The back of the box does point to the Elite coming with standard, presumably non-HD cables only, and unfortunately there is no mention of any bundled HDMI cables with each purchase. The Xbox Live wording was additionally altered from “Silver Membership” to “Free” as well.

While Left 4 Dead 2 was one of the biggest hits at that year’s E3, the post-event backlash has nearly threatened to overshadow the game itself. Despite the hostility from its usually loyal fan base, developer Valve decided to let us play even more of the game upon its visit to London yesterday. We wasted no instance putting our questions to Valve’s Doug Lombardi, as well as taking more than a few runs through the New Orleans level on both the Xbox 360 and PC.

First of all, it’s worth noting just how similar Left 4 Dead 2 is to the original game in terms of gameplay. While there are plenty of subtle changes that fans will notice, the meat of the game is precisely the same as before. You play in a team of four through various movie-inspired levels, taking on the zombie horde that stand within you and your extraction. The concept is simple: whether you stick together, it’s easier to stay alive, but whether you play as a lone gunman, you’ll die faster while sabotaging your team.

The level we played was called The Parish and followed on from the same mission that we saw at E3 precisely one month ago. Like the original Left 4 Dead, each level is presented with a movie poster, and that level’s tagline was “This moment it all goes South.” It’s a reference to the level’s location in New Orleans, where you fight it out in a suburban setting before crossing a bridge to invent it to an escape helicopter.

So what’s actually been changed for that sequel? Well, the most obvious new addition was the melee combat, with frying pans and axes available in the demo we played. They were only effective within close proximity to the enemy, but, boy, are they effective when you are. The axe is capable of lopping off limbs (dismemberment is another new feature of the game), while the pan makes a highly satisfying thud on impact. The most interesting melee weapon has yet to be shown–the chainsaw is an amazing prospect, so Valve is making us wait until later in the year before we get our hands on it.

Luckily, we were able to sink our teeth into plenty of other new features. There are now weapon upgrades available at random points in the game–we came across an incendiary upgrade that made our machine gun bullets set fire on impact. You only get about 50 of these fire-spewing shots per upgrade, but they certainly form short work of the standard zombies. thereupon there’s the brutal new enemy called the Charger, who picks you up and slams you to the ground repeatedly until your teammates come to rescue you.

The game was at its most tense during the gauntlet run–a term Valve used to explain the bridge section at the end of the level we played. Basically, a never-ending mass of zombies stand amidst you and the escape helicopter, so you have to work with your teammates to fend off the horde while slowly making your way across the bridge. Despite a liberal amount of gun turrets and ammo stockpiles, it’s incredibly difficult to assemble it across, and whether one of your team members die, there’s no way to bring him back into the game. No wonder we died a few times trying to compose it across here, but we loved the difference that made to the end of the level, as well as the tension it created.

The inhabitants of New Orleans are not that pleased to see you.

Valve was cagey about the difficulty level that was set up for our demonstration; but whatever Valve selected, it was damn hard. On our first run-through, we barely made it to the first safe house. On our second run-through, we made it about halfway across the bridge. On our final attempt, that day on the PC rather than Xbox 360, only one of our teammates made it to the helicopter–the rest of us died trying to get there. As hardened Left 4 Dead players, we found it a little bit frustrating, but it was no less addictive for the jump in difficulty.

Left 4 Dead 2 is shaping up really well, and with four new characters, the group dynamic has changed once again. We played as Coach, a huge dude with an attitude; and Rochelle, a smaller female character. There was additionally the white-suited Nick and the jocklike Ellis. We loved our day with the game, particularly playing with other journalists in the LAN setting. While Left 4 Dead 2 certainly doesn’t do anything drastically different, we’re confident that it will offer another highly addictive experience of the zombie apocalypse. The full game is out on the PC and Xbox 360 in November, and we should be able to bring you more within now and its release.

Get the full commentary at GameSpot

Interstellar Marines has had an interesting development. A first-person shooter conceived by Zero Point Software in the early 2000s, it was prototyped using a well-known game engine and next shopped around to the big publishers at the Games Developers Conference. However, the developers were deterred by the amount of changes that publishers wanted to manufacture to their game and decided to remain independent while continuing to work on the game. The aftermath is a game that…s being driven by the community that surrounds it and who has a very real opportunity of shaping the way the final product turns out. Zero Point Software recently dropped by our London office to show us the latest technology behind Interstellar Marines, as well as its vision for the future of what they signal.

According to game director Kim J…rgensen, the aim for Interstellar Marines is to present …first contact with an alien race in a plausible and even philosophical way.… You play one of these marines, working for the galactic equivalent of NATO, and you start the game scouting out Mars before moving onto a space station. There will be three types of enemies–high-level humans, like soldiers; low-level humans, like scientists; and numerous alien life forms, all of which have their own independent AI routines. The whole game is designed to be a short co-op experience for up to four citizens, with dynamic AI and enemy placement encouraging multiple play-throughs.

That’s what the team has planned for the game, anyway. At the moment, Zero Point has a number of demos that it uses to show proof of concept. The first is a demo built using high-end technology, but as it was created using the demo version of the tools, it can…t be shown publicly. It…s a shame considering it shows a high level of skill in terms of lighting, water, and organic effects, and while it’s showing its age now, the demo allows us to get a feel for the atmosphere Zero Point is trying to achieve. The inspiration from such films as Aliens is obvious, as is F.E.A.R. in terms of graphics and sound, and while J…rgensen acknowledges the influences, he promises a story that won…t just retread sci-fi shooter cliches.

However, high-end engines are too costly for an indie developer, which is why the team has recently moved development to Unity, a new high-level engine that…s a fraction of the cost of most industry-standard tools. The Unity demo is still in its early stages in terms of lighting, but it’s already showing the potential to deliver a first-person shooter on an indie budget. The demo is reminiscent of the Killzone 2 “Behind the Bullet” trailer, as marines and enemies battle it out suspended in date. The only enemies we’ve seen so far are giant sharks, which are the conclusion of human experimentation aboard one of the space ships. But the most impressive part of the demo is the ship that you…ll launch from at the start of the game. It shows off the role-playing-game-like upgrade system, and you…ll be able to use the computer on the ship to kit out your character as you plummet to earth.

considering of the aforementioned licensing issues, Zero Point is unable to show Interstellar Marines in video design or even release screenshots. However, with a new engine in place, Zero Point is hoping to show off more from the game soon. Zero Point plus plans to release a beta later in the year, with regular updates following to gather feedback from the community. What Zero Point Software is effectively doing is using the community as beta testers, gathering feedback from its fans on where they want the series to go. There’s still plenty of work to be done on Interstellar Marines, but there’s no doubt that it presents an interesting new way of developing games. For lots more info, produce certain you check out The GameSpot UK Podcast that week, where we talk to the developers about ‘AAA Indie’ development.

My Boxer
The first thing I do in any game that will let me is attempt to put myself into the game. My first attempt with the Xbox Live Vision Camera wasn’t too impressive, but using a proper digital camera and using front and side photos of my face uploaded to EA’s Website, I’ve ended up with a fighter that I think looks quite a lot like me–at least from some angles. There’s no option to add tattoos though. /sadface.

Bolton Wanderers fan Justin Calvert ready for his first (amateur) career fight.

Other Boxers
Going into the review, I was completely unaware that it would be possible to share boxers online. I haven’t uploaded mine for other citizens to beat up yet, but I’ve expanded the game’s roster with a whole bunch of player-made fighters. Favorites include Zab Judah, Evander Holyfield, Joe Louis, Gary Coleman, Chuck Norris, and Bill Cosby.

Norris versus Cosby

Hitting the Canvas
One of my favorite features of Fight Night Round 4 right now, other than the fighting itself, is the new mechanic for getting back to your feet after being knocked down. The camera shifts to a first-person perspective, you use the left stick to straighten up and avoid swaying left and right too much, and the right stick to actually stand. I particularly like the way that the ref checks you out before letting you continue.

Are you OK to continue?

Training
You don’t get to spend a whole lot of instance training in career mode, so fighter progression can be slow. The training minigames are fun, but their difficulty is wildly inconsistent.

This is one of the easier training minigames. Some of them are really difficult early on.

Online Play
I haven’t entered the Online World Championship yet, but I’ve taken part in plenty of online bouts with friends that, to term, have been lag-free. That was before the game officially went on sale, though, so I need to see whether the game is still performing as well now that there are a lot more society online.

That’s about all I’m going to say for now. I’ll be playing as JusticeCovert on both PS3 and X360 that weekend, so whether any of you feel like stepping into the squared circle with me feel free to shoot me an invite. I can’t promise that I’ll jump straight into a game with you though–getting through the career mode has to take priority.

Though it has no problem with the ultraviolent combat in Metal Gear Solid 4, Konami apparently no longer has the stomach for Six Days in Fallujah’s purportedly “ultrarealistic” recreation of the Iraq War. According to the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, the Tokyo-based company has decided not to publish the Atomic Games-developed war-action title, which it touted at a gamers’ day event just last month.

“Hitman 1 to Hitman 2, interrogative: So who’s publishing us now?”

“After seeing the reaction to the video game in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it,” a Konami rep told the Asahi Shimbun. When asked for comment by GameSpot, Konami of America said the rep handling the game was out of the office. Inquiries sent to Atomic Games had not been returned as of press date.

Though no opinion-givers were mentioned by name by the Asahi Shimbun, the game had been vociferously criticized by several families who had lost members in the Iraq war as well as the British anti-war group Stop the War Coalition.
Konami and Atomic’s defense was that Six Days in Fallujah would be a “survival horror” game which would show the ugly face of the Iraq War, now in its seventh year.

“We had intended to convey the reality of the battles to players so that they could feel what it was like to be there,” the Konami rep told the Asahi Shimbun. Those comments were echoed in a GameSpot video interview (below) with several veterans of the actual Second Battle of Fallujah, Operation Phantom Fury, who were acting as technical advisors for the game.

“Xbox 360 | Konami retreats from Six Days in Fallujah – Report” was posted by Tor Thorsen on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:29:01 -0700